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Spaced, series one (again)

Part of the plot of episode six of Spaced series one includes an extended sequence in a dance club, where Tim, Daisy and their friends work out or suppress some of their anxieties in a blissed-out haze of perspiration. Part of the context comes from a reminiscence where Daisy's conversation with Marsha imparts that she was a teenage rebel, but a flashback cutaway shows her teenage self conservatively dressed and assuring her mother that she will be back home early. Spaced's situation is one of extended and reinvented youth. Tim and Mike are forever returning to the comfort bonds of hurt and guilt in their childhood, until they achieve some sort of redemption when Mike is restored to his place in the Territorial Army in episode seven. Episode six suggests that Brian can move on, the dance club experience overwriting his Dexy's Midnight Runners-shaped memory of humiliation in early adulthood. Tyres, meanwhile, finds the fragility of his self-image as a clubland messiah dented when he tries to leave the club through a cloud of smoke, only to return coughing. For the moment, though, it seems that the generation gap can be bridged, though only with the help of drugs and dance music. Otherwise teenagers remain the alien species they are presented as in episode two: enticing the twenty- and thirtysomethings with Close Encounters but otherwise possessed of a dangerous and envied vitality.

Our protagonists are all people who fear that time is passing by even as they seize opportunities to push it along. Daisy's attachment to her manual typewriter was archaic even in 1999. Yet at the same time she and others are more real to us and to themselves than figures whom they regard as successful and close to the zeitgeist. More thoughts when I have watched series two.

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The Quest of the Parrot Knight

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The memoirs of Sir Guinglain Le Parrot, sometime of the court of King Arthur, transported by means unknown to Brooks's Club in the 1780s, and facing a challenge to a drinking contest from Charles James Fox. To the Buff and Blue, and the Good Old Cause of the Whigs!